Top 10 Web Application Firewall (WAF) Providers in 2018

With the rapid rise in number of enterprises adopting cloud for running business applications and storing confidential data, cyber-criminals are primarily targeting websites and web applications.

As per a research, a single data breach costs around $5.9 million to enterprises in US to remediate the loss of data, service disruption, and reputation tarnishing.

To secure the internal and public web applications and data, enterprises use Web Application Firewalls (WAF). It helps them avoid the expensive data breaches and downtime. The WAFs are deployed to protect the web servers against hacking attempts, monitor the access to web applications, and gather access logs for compliance and analytics.

The difference between a firewall and a web application firewall (WAF) is that a firewall protects the client whereas a WAF protects the server.

Further, it helps enterprises meet the PCI compliance requirements to handle the credit card information of consumers. The PCI compliance can be met by deploying a WAF in front of the website, or by conducting application vulnerability security reviews of in-scope web applications.

2. Citrix

Citrix provides NetScaler AppFirewall service for analyzing all the bi-directional traffic, like SSL-encrypted communication, for protecting the server against various cyber-attacks.

Using the Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall, enterprises can perform deep-packet inspection of HTTP, HTTPS, and XML. It can also protect against the SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, cookie tampering, form validation and protection, JSON payload inspection, and signature and behavior-based protections.

Citrix delivers its NetScaler AppFirewall technology through the NetScaler MPX and VPX appliances. The appliance supports memory range between 8GB to 48GB with its MPX versions. Whereas, the platform performance ranges between 0.5 Gbps to 20 Gbps.

It is available in appliance, virtual machine, hosted, cloud, and container.

4. Trustwave

Trustwave WAF can protect web applications against scraping, malicious bots, zero-day threats, targeted attacks, as well as the OWASP top 10. It offers a wide range of security capabilities like positive and negative security, virtual patching, inspection of outgoing traffic, etc.

It can detect the threats in real-time, allows you pre-define rules, and customize scenarios for specific needs of apps and business.

For prioritizing and responding faster to the threats, Trustwave WAF comes with centralized management dashboards and an intuitive UI. Further, it can be implemented inline or out-of-line, and as a cloud service in Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. It can also be deployed as a physical or virtual appliance.

5. Sucuri

Sucuri offers a cloud-based WAF for detecting and mitigating the DDoS attacks, zero-day exploits, as well as the OWASP Top 10. It can also prevent brute force attacks against the website login pages.

Sucuri WAF allows addition of custom rules for virtual patching and hardening, and comes with smart caching options. It supports fast HTTP/2, reduces server load, works with other CDNs, and optimizes the resources via GZIP compression. Enterprises can install this WAF with a simple DNS change.

If you are building a website, you can deploy this WAF as a hardware, software in hypervisor or private cloud, on public clouds including Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, or as a part of the F5 Silverline service.

8. Radware

Radware delivers WAF service through its AppWall, which provides reliable security for mission-critical web applications for corporate networks and in the cloud.

AppWall comes integrated with Radware Attack Mitigation Solution, and supports several deployment modes— on-premise, in the cloud, inline, out of band, and as a stand-alone service.

9. Incapsula

Incapsula’s WAF comes as a cloud-based managed service that can defend against application layer attacks, such as OWASP top 10 and zero-day threats.

It is a PCI-certified service, SIEM-ready, and allows customization of WAF security policies. When setup your website and use Incapsula, you can configure the security rules as per the security needs on the basis of IP reputation, URL slug, client type, number of requests, geo-data.

10. SiteLock

SiteLock TrueShield WAF provides advanced protection against websites from malicious traffic and requests. It can secure the websites from bots and attacks by evaluating the traffic based on behavior, IP reputation, location and type of information.

It can automatically block malicious bots from accessing websites, locks down your site database so that it becomes difficult for attackers to hack your site. It also protects against the top 10 online threats including cross-site scripting, and SQL injection.

Conclusion:

No matter whether you are a startup, small/medium or large enterprise, the web application firewall should be a top priority for you. Your business can’t afford to loss customer data, assets, financial transactions, etc.
Mentioned above are the best web application firewall providers. Choosing the right one primarily depends of the requirements of your business, budget, and height of protection.